Actor Martin Sheen helps Tulsa addiction treatment center at fundraiser
BY JENNIFER CHANCELLOR World Scene Writer
Sunday, December 09, 2012
12/09/12 at 3:43 AM
For more on the movie Read the full review.
Martin Sheen is helping raise money and awareness for drug and alcohol treatment and recovery in Green Country.
The Hollywood icon knows of what he speaks: Years ago, Tulsa 12 & 12 co-founder Chris Malick helped Sheen find sobriety, Sheen said during a recent telephone interview.
On Wednesday, Sheen makes a return trip to the 12 & 12 addiction treatment and recovery center that his friend helped establish more than 30 years ago.
"Addiction treatment and recovery centers help the entire community in ways most never see," Sheen said during a recent phone interview. "People we all know need help. They're in our churches. They're our co-workers. They're our children and our family members. Addiction touches us all, whether it's drugs and alcohol, sex, gambling, anger ... it hits all of us. We have to fix our own communities."
The nonprofit center - the largest of its kind in Oklahoma - needs to upgrade its outdated kitchen that serves three hot meals to approximately 250 clients a day, said Bryan Day, 12 & 12 executive director.
The need for a "non-corporate" treatment center like 12 & 12 in Oklahoma is real and important, Sheen said. The kitchen, however, can no longer be sustained with "patchwork" maintenance. The kitchen is "original to the building," having been installed in the 1970s, said Paula Hall-Collins, 12 & 12 director of development and marketing.
The needs include commercial-grade cooking appliances, coolers, freezers, pots and pans, and more. "That's everything," Sheen said. "Including silverware."
Sheen said he hopes to help the center raise $68,000 at Wednesday's dinner event. "12 & 12 is more important to the poor and disenfranchised - the marginalized people - because it helps them, too," Sheen said. "Rehabilitation and treatment makes it possible for everyone to lift themselves up into the community to participate - this is my main reason for coming to Tulsa.
"I believe Tulsa can do this because Chris knew Tulsa could do this."
Huge impact
"Addiction is the 'tip of the spear' in regard to society's social issues," Day said. "Poverty, health, mental health, domestic violence, child neglect, criminality, incarceration - treatment positively impacts each of these social issues."
Day said the average life expectancy in Oklahoma is 71.6 years. Add in addiction and/or mental health issues, and that number drops to 43.3 years.
"The impact on the health of our citizens is dramatic," Day said. "The importance of treatment and recovery programs is hard to overstate. It impacts everything, including our state economy."
Malick and his wife, Ann, understood this need all too well. She's volunteered at the center since it first opened in the 1980s, and he helped run the place until his death in 2008.
Malick was a successful oil and gas man in Oklahoma for many decades. His older brother is film director Terrence Malick. Both spent many formative years in Bartlesville.
"I've known the Malick family since the '70s," Sheen said.
In 1982, Malick founded the Washita Production Co. Soon after, he and about a dozen area businessmen founded the 12 & 12 men's recovery group, originally located at 12 E. 12th St. It helped dozens of men, many destitute, his wife said.
By 1988, it was certified by the Department of Mental Health. In 1990, it added women's services. In 1993, it moved to 6333 E. Skelly Drive and is now a 250-bed treatment center that includes a "full spectrum" of services, including medically assisted detox, inpatient and outpatient treatment, half-way residency, counseling services, and daily 12-step meetings, Day said. Approximately 5,000 patients are treated each year.
Treatable illness
Day said 12 & 12 works from the official American Medical Association definition of addiction - that it's a chronic illness, brain-based and treatable over long periods.
Said Day: "It's like diabetes or heart disease. If you don't treat those things, you'll die. You can't operate to remove diabetes and be 'cured.' ... Addiction is similar."
Sheen visited Tulsa once before for 12 & 12's first big fundraiser about a decade ago, and "he comes back regularly to check in on us, to meet people, to see what's happening," Ann Malick said.
Day said addiction often goes hand-in-hand with mental health issues, including clinical depression and severe mental illness.
Medical professionals now know that addiction is a disease, not a decision. Often, addicts include a mother using prescription anxiety medicine, a father managing pain from a work-related injury or a war veteran self-medicating post-traumatic stress disorder.
"Whether the addict denies the problem or society denies addiction is real, it's all denial," Sheen said. Sheen speaks from experience, as does Ann Malick, who said she has a "long, long family history" of addiction - and recovery.
"Chris and I, when we were first together, we'd drive around Tulsa and Chris would see people camping under the 11th Street bridge. He'd say, 'Those people need treatment.' He wanted to help everyone who needed it, especially the indigent," Ann Malick said. "He gets credit for this. Chris and his friends get all the credit for starting this program and its success. ... I don't have any plans to leave Tulsa. Ever. There's too much good to do."
DINE WITH MARTIN SHEEN
to benefit Tulsa's 12 & 12 Center for Addiction Treatment and Recovery
When: 6:30 p.m. Wednesday; refreshments and music followed by four-course meal by chef Justin Thompson of Juniper and Prhyme Downtown Steakhouse.
Where: First Place Tower, 41st Floor, 15 E. Fifth Place
Tickets: Space is limited. Seats are $300; $4,000 table of eight; $10,000 for table of eight, seated with Martin Sheen. Call 918-779-7181 with questions, to make your RSVP or to make a dietary request.
Speaker: Martin Sheen
Honoring: 12 & 12 Board of Directors
Beneficiary: 12 & 12 Inc.'s urgent need for new kitchen appliances
Auction: Items include personal scripts from Martin Sheen, dinner for eight at Prhyme, a nine-course dinner for eight at Polo Grill including hand-selected wines, a five-course wine tasting dinner for eight at Fleming's Steakhouse, a multicourse dinner for eight at the Chalkboard and more.
To support 12 & 12
To donate to the nonprofit 12 & 12 Center for Addiction Treatment and Recovery, call Paula Hall-Collins, director of development and marketing, at 918-779-7181.
‘THE WAY’
2010, PG-13, 123 minutes
The film, though not autobiographical,
is the tale of a father and son
played by father and son Martin
Sheen and Emilio Estevez. The two
penned an autobiography planned
as a companion to the movie.
Sheen, Estevez share stories of family, addiction
"Along the Way: The Journey of a Father and Son" offers a wealth of personal insight, experience, bonding and full-on living. By Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez with Hope Edelman, the book was planned as a partner publication to Estevez's movie, "The Way." It soon took on a life of its own.
"Memory is such an odd companion. Within its grip we live simultaneously in the energy of the present and the deep emotional places of the past," Sheen writes. The book melds the old with the new, starting and ending in the family seat of Spain. Each chapter shares a perspective of son, then father, about episodes in the men's lives.
Sheen was born Ramón Antonio Gerardo Estevez, one of 10 children, to a Spanish immigrant father and Irish immigrant mother. As a teen, he left home with a few hundred dollars in his pocket and headed to New York City.
"When you grow up the son of an actor, you get used to seeing your father come and go. Really, it's all I ever knew," Estevez writes. However, Sheen's family often picked up at a moment's notice for whatever project the now-legendary actor was a part of - "Catch-22" in Mexico in '69, Ireland in '73 for "Badlands" and the Philippines jungles in '76 for "Apocalypse Now."
Both men chronicle the darkest days of Sheen as he lost himself in the demanding role of Captain Benjamin L. Willard in "Apocalypse Now" and how one of the movie's most famous meltdown scenes was all too bloody - and real. Estevez chronicles his own friendship with director Francis Ford Coppola, from a teenage boy on the set of his father's movie to a star in his own, in the cast of the movie version of S.E. Hinton's novel "The Outsiders."
Again, the family story comes full circle as Sheen finds sobriety just as his youngest son, Charlie, needs an intervention for his own alcohol and drug abuse. Sheen says, "No one can live our lives for us or carry our inner burdens, yet we can come to know ourselves only through our compassion for others."
‘ALONG THE WAY: THE JOURNEY OF A FATHER AND SON’
By Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez with Hope Edelman
(Free Press, 395 pages, $27 hardback)
Original Print Headline: Sheen helps Tulsa treatment center
Jennifer Chancellor 918-581-8346
jennifer.chancellor@tulsaworld.com
Associated Images:
Sheen
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